Are folks that haven’t had mainframes before buying big iron?
We are seeing new mainframe customers. IBM reported in 2008 something like 52 new mainframe customers. And 30 of them were the Linux-only customers. There are two interesting parts to those numbers. One, you’re getting the z/OS customers in emerging economies like China, Korea and India that want to set up their banking institutions in a similar way to the U.S. and the West. But the other part is that people are now buying mainframes as an entry point into a large-scale computing strategy around z/Linux and serious virtualization. That’s very interesting. IBM has the entry-level, business-class box that is around $100,000. So it is very affordable to go out and buy your first mainframe and run z/Linux and make it a serious part of a medium-size business. Has service-oriented architecture given the mainframe a new breath of life? It definitely has in terms of the ability now for applications to be rehosted to the mainframe, whether it is z/Linux or applications running on z/OS. From CA’
